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New Switch – Ubiquiti US-8-150W

I was looking at the spaghetti nightmare running off one of my switches and decided to splash out on a new Ubiquiti US-8-150W switch to replace the existing 5 port Netgear switch. I specifically chose to get a Ubiquiti switch to find out what kind of management features are available in Ubiquitis Unifi Network Controller GUI and by getting a POE capable switch, I could get rid of 3 POE injectors that run the two Ubiquiti cameras and one Ubiquiti access point.

Much neater wiring now 🙂

The first thing I noticed when it arrived is how heavy the device is compared to a Netgear ProSafe 5 port switch… this new switch is heavy!! This posed a little bit of a problem as the wall the switch was going to be mounted on isn’t capable of taking heavy devices, so it had to be put on a backing board and screwed onto the wall frame joists rather than the wall boards.

The second thing you notice when it’s been on for a little while is how hot this device gets! It’s got no fan in it but does have a lot of air holes on the sides of the case and the case is metal which helps to dissipate the heat. Despite this, it still runs rather toasty… Lets hope when we get a 30+C day that it still continues to work!

In Unifi Network Controller, the switch shows on the overview page in the switches stack.

If you click on the switch stack, you’ll be taken to the Devices tab with the filter set to wired devices.

On the devices tab, you can configure VLAN tagging and POE (if it’s a POE switch) per port.

On the insights tab you can see how much data each port has sent/received, link speed status and POE settings all from one page.

And on the map tab you’ll see that Unifi Network Controller has started to draw more of your network as a dynamic diagram. Note from the picture below that my switch isn’t off of my AP but that’s how the map view has decided to depict the network… It also shows a multitude of devices on the uplink port that are not directly connected to the switch but reside on other parts of my network (shown below as port #8).

Overall would I recommend it? Well it was a bit of a folly in my case as I already had a working switch and three POE injectors. I certainly won’t get the money spent on the new switch selling the old parts on Ebay… I bought it to tidy the wiring spaghetti which it’s successfully helped with but it’s not really worth the £200 price tag… Compared to a Netgear ProSafe plus switch that uses the old style Netgear management application, the management of the switch in Unifi Network Controller is vastly superior (easier to upgrade the switch, better UI, more functionality) but again, probably not worth the £170 over a Netgear switch. It’s very easy to get caught up in the Unifi world though and the more devices you have from Ubiquiti, the less likely you are to purchase other brands…